Something Just Like This
by Ssergit
Summary: Darcy Lewis's life was pretty extraordinary, and that was *before* she ended up on friendly terms with the Avengers and became somewhat of a lab rat for testing out their various devices and experiments. After a simple 'trust me on this' from her friend Tony Stark, Darcy found herself in the 1940's having to rely on Tony's playboy father of all people to get back home. Howard/Darcy
1. A Distinct Lack of Ceiling Cages

**SOMETHING JUST LIKE THIS**

Extended Summary:

Darcy Lewis's life was pretty extraordinary, and that was *before* she ended up on friendly terms with the Avengers and became somewhat of a lab rat for testing out their various devices and experiments. After a simple 'trust me on this' from her friend Tony Stark, Darcy found herself in the 1940's having to rely on Tony's playboy father of all people to get back home.

With the bittersweet knowledge that James Barnes would be long dead in her own time, Darcy forged a friendship that she knew couldn't last long, but it was the unexpected realization of who both of the Stark men were and would be in her life that truly shook her.

This is a story about perspectives. It's a story about love, fate, what's set in stone, and what it means to change.

Notes:

I would be lying if I said I wasn't inspired by the other Darcy/Howard stories with a similar premise on AO3. In coming up with this story, I wanted to take that inspiration and turn it into something that really examined three main aspects of the plotline.

Firstly, I want to experience the fun of Darcy's realization that she is Tony's mother at a point when she still sees Howard as a one-dimensional person she's not entirely fond of.

Secondly, I want to portray a time at rest at the most tumultuous period in both Darcy and Tony's lives, when they're both aware of who they are, how they're related, and how they grapple with wanting the very best for each other.

Thirdly, with both hope and a bittersweet dose of reality, how Howard and Darcy's relationship can and can not be altered for Tony, and how it can be understood.

My plan for this story does involve a happy ending, and I don't intend to skimp on the romance. However, there's a lot of feels here, and a lot of them are, as I already hinted, bittersweet. To balance that, I plan to have enough of a story arc in Parts I and II that folks who don't want to explore that third, more angsty section can skip it and still feel satisfied.

**Part I: Fight**** Club**

She said "Where d'you want to go?"

"How much you wanna risk?"

I'm not looking for somebody with some superhuman gifts

Some superhero, some fairytale bliss

Just something I can turn to

Somebody I can kiss

I want something just like this

_-Something Just Like This,_ Coldplay

**Chapter One: A Distinct Lack of Ceiling Cages**

Darcy Lewis was something of a fatalist. She always had been, and this feeling that she was moved by the hand of fate had never seemed more certain than in the moment after she'd used electricity to fell the God of Thunder. That Thor called her his 'lightning sister' when he saw her gave her the same sort of thrill as she'd had the night it happened. Certain events in her life simply rang like bells in her mind, as if she should expect that on the last day of her life, their melody would play in order, finally recognizable and complete. That moment had certainly been one of them.

On the day that she and Jane moved into the repaired Avengers Tower, Darcy made an agreement to herself that she would _not_ examine how often those 'bell ringing' moments were happening as any kind of indicator for how long she had left to live, because those moments? They were coming on thick and fast, lately.

There were other moments that, however extraordinary, were just part of how crazy her life was, now.

That first night in the tower found Darcy bursting with energy and no Jane Foster to talk to. Jane had fallen asleep almost as soon as she'd picked which bedroom she would be claiming, which probably made sense given how late she'd been up packing the night before. Still, it was only ten at night and Darcy had only seen roughly one percent of her new home, and that would just not do.

At first, Darcy walked close to the wall, making note of the way the hallway angled around. The hallway was narrow along the inside where it was lined with apartment doors, the hallway dead-ending at a mirror that Darcy suspected might be a disguised door. Darcy followed the decorative carpet from the mirror, walking beside the doors that led to each suite. She saw that after about ten doors, the curve of the wall grew more broad and the spiral theme from the carpet was reinforced by an impressive picture window. The individual panes grew taller as the hallway widened into the common area. The custom-cut glass alone looked like it cost more than any apartment _building_ Darcy had ever lived in. A phrase from Jurassic Park echoed in her head as Darcy walked into the communal space.

'_Spared no expense!'_

The windows that had started as a small decorative element in the closed-off hallway grew into floor to ceiling windows which curved around the common area and looked out on New York City. The same spiral theme was reflected in the open plan of the room, with a uniquely shaped (and frankly gigantic) teardrop island in the kitchen and a dining area with curvy chandeliers so gorgeously crafted they probably could have easily been featured in an architectural museum. The massive television was accompanied by a spiral shaped couch that would have looked stupid on a website or diagram but fit perfectly in the strangely beautiful room. The overall effect was incredible, and Darcy figured it would look even nicer in daylight. As nice as everything looked, it didn't satisfy her curiosity about the rest of the building, so she turned around and headed back into the narrow hallway.

After Darcy had ridden the elevator on the way up the first time and looked out one of the windows in their room, she had seen that their residential floor was quite high in the building. The rooms she shared with Jane were on the highest floor accessible via that elevator, even- but Darcy wasn't an avid reader of spy novels and comic books for nothing. There were floors above her, and she wanted to snoop in them.

On her second pass, she saw one door that looked different from the other suite doors, and when she turned the knob, it opened out into a staircase.

"Is it weird to say I wouldn't mind evacuating down these suckers, if I had to?" Darcy said aloud. There was a comfy odd rubbery fabric on the stairs that muffled sound and softened her footfalls.

They also went up, whereas the elevator… did not.

There were three more floors that the stairs led to, but the doors for the top two were locked, complete with blinking red lights on their access panels. Darcy didn't bother touching them. When she went back down to the floor that wasn't locked, she didn't pause before walking straight through the door.

This floor was more utilitarian. It was also empty. The sparsely scattered doors were all fitted with locks, some more impressive than others, but the latches weren't engaged, and they guarded empty rooms. She was just starting to feel bored with the monotony of checking each room when she found something unexpected inside one of them: a staircase.

These stairs weren't covered with the special comfort stuff, and there were two landings of eleven stairs each before she reached the top of it. The final four steps led to an arch that opened up into a hallway, with a door at the end of it that looked straight out of the Avengers spy television series.

So _naturally,_ Darcy walked up to it.

There was a hand plate beside the door, and Darcy couldn't help but think about the day full of paperwork and fingerprint scanners that she and Jane had gone through in order to get permission to live and work there. She knew that there was no way that Iron Man's hidden Avengers Squared lab would open up to her handprint, but what was she going to do, _leave?_ A few seconds after she placed her hand on the scanner, she heard the unmistakable voice of Stark's robot butler speaking on the other side of the door.

"Sir, someone is at the door. The readout of their credentials should appear on your tablet."

"Is there really? Hell, even _I_ barely remembered this lab exists. _This_ I gotta see!"

Darcy took her split second of warning evaluate her options. Standing there like a confident but completely idiotic person had its charms, but she totally wanted to know if a force field or a metal gate would come sliding down from the ceiling if she pulled her hand away and started back toward the stairs. That would be quite a sight to see, and had the added benefit of showing that she had an inkling of how much she was Not Authorized To Be There.

On the other hand, the very fact that she could hear anything that happened on the other side of the door might mean that, despite Stark's presence there, despite the hand scanner, maybe that room wasn't a Super Death Imminent kind of secret?

She decided that the possibility of a ceiling cage was cooler in more ways than one. Darcy turned away and started to power walk toward the stairs.

Behind her, the door opened, but Darcy didn't let her steps falter. Confidence was key.

"The stairway door locks from this side, I think," Tony Stark said in a casual tone of voice. "The handprint scanner unlocks it, unless you aren't _authorized_, of course."

Darcy _almost _stopped, but managed to keep up her strides until she reached the top of the stairs. Without turning around, she spoke, rolling her eyes at herself after hearing the tremor of fear in her voice.

"That makes perfect sense, thank you. Could you just pop your hand onto the scanner so I can get out of your hair, please?"

The silence between them was an oppressive thing. Darcy was mentally filing paperwork to assign it its own zip code by the time he spoke again.

"I _could,"_ Stark said. "But I would rather know who would be escaping my clutches beforehand."

Darcy couldn't stop herself from whirling around. "Okay, '_clutches?!'_ Is that terminology something you gain access to with the whole superhero thing, or is it more of a personal vocabulary choice? Wait, never mind," she said, putting up a 'stop' hand as she shook her head. "What am I even saying? It's clearly an ego thing. I bet you used 'clutches' before you even started puberty."

She finally let herself look in Stark's direction, but Darcy wasn't prepared for what she saw. He was wearing grimy coveralls, and the tips of his fingers sported dark stains that she recognized as the product of some serious mechanical work. Seeing a rich playboy type without his snazzy suit wasn't what shocked her, though. What shocked her was his expression.

Darcy was used to turning heads. Even in her least revealing clothes, her body was just _noticeable,_ and she'd made her peace with that. So 'stunned by the boobs' face was something she'd come to accept and mostly tune out, especially when meeting a guy for the first time. She thought of it as her little gift to the male half of the population— the first ogle was usually free.

Stark was not making any of the standard faces, though. He looked stunned, his gaze tracing over her repeatedly, as if disbelieving what he was seeing.

"Starting to freak me out a bit there, Iron Man," Darcy said after a full ninety seconds of uncomfortable staring. "If you're upset about the security breach, you should know I've been in this tower for less than six hours, and I could adequately describe my path up here as 'meandering.'"

Stark blinked at her, his head tipping sideways as if he'd italicized his incredulity. "That's not it. You're surprising in many ways, honestly," he said, his eyebrows shooting skyward as he nodded at her flip flops. "You actually reminded me of someone," he added. With a shake of his head as if he were trying to re-orient himself to his surroundings, Stark said, "Forget it."

Since it didn't look like she was going to get in trouble for snooping around after all, Darcy felt a bit more comfortable. "The whole 'this door is super ordinary and like all the others, you don't have to even bother looking inside' approach probably works with almost everyone," she said reassuringly. "It took a nosy lab assistant with insomnia to really push back. I'd say security for this place is fine, except—"

Stark crossed his arms, a kind of challenge shining in his eyes. "Go on?"

"Well," Darcy crossed her own arms. The distance between them didn't make her feel as diminutive as she ordinarily would in this situation. "You say the wall panel unlocks the stair door, but that's bluster, right? Because I didn't see an intercom. You're going to end up with nosy employees starving to death in your secret stairway if you don't come here all that often. That's not a great look."

"It was bluster," Stark admitted with a grin.

"Damn, I'm usually good at figuring that shit out. You got me," Darcy said, pointing at him.

"So, lab assistant, that means Foster's lackey, right?" he asked.

Darcy was getting tired of talking to someone with a freeway's width of space between them, but she just had this sense that walking over toward Tony Stark would be some kind of victory for him, so she shifted her weight from one foot to another and answered him without moving closer. "Yep."

"Are you a physics grad student?" he said dubiously.

"Why, don't I look like one?" she challenged.

Stark tipped his head to the other side this time. "I'm pretty sure I'm the name on your checks, I'm not going to answer that one, Ms. Curie." He tapped a few things on the tablet in his hands (which was thinner and sleeker looking than any Stark tech she'd seen in stores, Darcy noticed) and nodded at her. "You're good to skedaddle."

"A Captain America word _and_ no sexual harrassment?" Darcy said in a shocked voice. "Mister Stark, you need to get some sleep."

"I concur with Miss Lewis, Sir," the British-voiced AI broke in. "You have been awake for thirty-five hours and nineteen minutes. In eleven minutes, I will be giving you a thirty minute warning before Ms. Potts' Contingency Plan will go into effect."

"Wow, you wrote an AI that can infer capitalization?" Darcy asked Tony Stark. Her snark was slightly dampened by the fact that she let out a huge yawn right after speaking.

"Do you want to starve in the stairwell or not?" Stark asked her, his voice colored by a bit of pride along with irritation.

"Don't worry, I'm skedaddling. You _do_ know that only psychopaths aren't affected by the sympathetic yawn reflex, though, right?" Darcy said, starting down the stairs.

The longer it took for him to say something back to her, the more her expectation grew, but Darcy ended up with the last word. She had to hand it to Stark, though- no retort was almost more disturbing than anything he could have said.

oOoOoOoOo

Over the next week, Darcy split her time between helping Jane set things up the way she wanted them in her brand new lab (85%), settling both of their belongings into the amazing apartment suite Tony had given them to live in (10%), and trying to get herself killed by an Avenger (5%).

It wasn't really her fault. There were things that were just common knowledge around the tower, things like 'just because Doctor Banner likes to drink coffee and talk excitedly with Jane four days in a row doesn't mean he's going to expect you to hand him his coffee on the fifth day.' Most of the coffee had landed on Darcy, not Banner, and he hadn't hulked out even a little bit, but it was still a bad impression, and Darcy knew she wanted to make up for it somehow.

She'd changed her clothes and put the last of their things away to give the two PhDs enough time to chat without the stress of Darcy's presence. Then she'd taken some time to take stock of the communal kitchen. To her surprise and delight, there was a reasonable split between hippy dippy ingredients that made her eyes roll (dried Kaffir lime leaves? _Tasmanian Pepperberry?) _and standard baking ingredients like flour and brown sugar. She made some notes and headed out to buy the rest of what she needed. On the way back, Darcy picked up some takeout and dropped it off for Jane. As much as she'd been hoping to talk with her while they both ate, Jane had her 'Manic Edging' look on, the one where she could be tipped over into an explosion of explanation of what she'd been working on (or worse, what she _wanted_ to be working on, sometimes) that made Darcy despair of ever being a well-rounded, interesting person in comparison.

She was still munching on her last bite of kebab when she walked through the hallway toward their apartment and saw, in the mirror at the end of the hallway, something _drop out of the ceiling_ behind her.

Darcy spun around and threw her hands up to protect herself, launching her kebab stick, her fountain drink, and her bag of icing sugar and food coloring out with them. The drink moved the fastest, spinning and somehow keeping its lid on until it landed with a splash on the intruder. The grocery bag, weighted down by the food coloring, fell away from the sugar bag, which, in an action that made the concept of probability weep, collided with the kebab stick and burst open spectacularly.

That was how, in a matter of sixty seconds, Darcy Lewis found herself facing a sticky, sugar-coated Clint Barton, directly in front of Natasha Romanoff's apartment door.

"Wow, on a scale of mostly dead to utter toast, how fucked am I right now?" Darcy said, her eyes wide.

Beside them, the Black Widow's door opened, because _of course it did._

oOoOoOo

Clint Barton, aka Hawkeye, had a habit of traveling through the tower in the air ducts, which was something Darcy simultaneously thought made perfect sense _and_ sounded like something someone would make up to make themselves sound cool. The fact that this fact had been explained to her by Natasha Romanoff in an exasperated tone that, unbelievably, was directed at _Hawkeye_ at the time was incredibly encouraging to Darcy in that moment. The second unbelievable thing (third, really. Darcy was certain she could spend the rest of her life tossing bags of sugar and never get that same result, not in fifty years of trying) was that, as soon as the Black Widow's eyes had lit on the entire scene, the man covered in sugar was the one spluttering apologies and explanations.

Thankfully it hadn't taken much convincing on either Darcy _or_ Romanoff's part to persuade him to go clean himself up. At that point, right before Darcy was about to explain her part in the whole thing, Romanoff had held up a single, trembling finger.

Then she'd started laughing so hard that Darcy couldn't help but join in. They laughed for a few minutes straight, regaining their composure and then completely _losing it_ again when they both noticed the crime scene of perfectly formed footprints surrounded by icing sugar on the carpet. He'd dusted himself off as best he could while standing still. A few photographs later, Darcy and _the Black Widow_ had trauma-bonded.

"The worst part is," Darcy said, when she finally had control over her voice again. "I'd bought that to make cookies to apologize to the Doctor Banner for spilling coffee on him and thank him for not hulking out as a result. Now I'm going to need _two_ bags!"

oOoOoOo

Nearly aerosolized icing sugar combined with carbonated soda had the potential to solidify into a substance remarkably like concrete, it turned out.

oOoOoOo

Baking happened the next day, which was a Saturday. That meant that Darcy had been living in Avengers tower for a full week, and she'd managed to nearly die twice, or three times if you counted snooping outside the door of Tony Stark's hidden lab of potential stairway death.

As she decorated the circle-cut cookies with long arrows and big Hulk fists (which didn't look great, but hopefully Banner would appreciate the thought, because the alternative was to try to make _faces)_, Darcy considered making a few look like Stark's arc reactor, but decided against it. She hadn't felt threatened enough to warrant Apology Cookies, and Stark had been MIA since their strange encounter, anyway.

She hadn't expected to have to _guard_ the cookies as they cooled further and the icing set, but Darcy had guessed by the fact that the cookie sheets were still shrink-wrapped that baking wasn't a tradition. Yet. By the time they were ready to be eaten, the kitchen island had almost a full complement of Avengers. Captain Rogers, Natasha Romanoff (who was still going to be called Ms. Romanoff out loud, because laugh riot or not, respect was respect), Doctor Banner, Hawkeye, and Jane all joked and laughed with each other and Darcy.

"All right, I give. No one has even tried to steal a cookie and yet I've been living in vigilant fear ever since I laid them on the racks. I can't take it anymore, have at them!" Darcy told the group.

One by one, her cookies were lifted, examined, and tasted, and to her relief, everyone seemed to be pleased with her offering. The slow grin that grew on Barton's face after his first bite of an arrow cookie had been very gratifying.

"Come. Sit," he told her, walking over to the couch and pointing at the space beside him. Within twenty minutes, Darcy was on a first-name basis with Clint, whose descriptions of how much he liked _this_ iteration of icing sugar better than the kind he'd had to shower off of himself verged on the indecent.

"I'm gonna assume that these are delicious, because someone clearly ate all of the Iron Man ones first," Stark declared, walking into the room with the casual confidence of a man who'd built the entire building.

"I didn't even know you were in town," Banner said.

"Oh, I didn't nearly kill you or get killed, so I didn't make any Iron Man ones," Darcy said around a too-large bite of a Hawkeye cookie. "Don't worry, I'm sure it'll happen."

"Given the look on your face when I came out of my apartment, I think at least one of those should be a Black Widow cookie," Ms. Romanoff said in a low voice from her spot on the other side of Clint on the couch. Darcy widened her eyes in agreement and nodded.

"Next time," she whispered.

"Are you sticking around for a while this time?" Rogers asked Stark.

"Yep, I've got a… Thing to work on," Stark said, throwing a sidelong glance at Darcy.

"I might not have super special secret God-mode clearance, but I'm no tattletale," Darcy told him.

"That's not it, Physics Intern #3," Stark said, picking up a Hulk cookie and biting into it experimentally. "It's something personal. SHIELD doesn't tell me anything they don't want me to accidentally mention anyway, right, JARVIS?" he added loudly, lifting his chin and glancing at the light fixtures above him.

"That comment has been duly recorded for your records, Sir," the disembodied voice said from a hidden speaker in the ceiling.

"Not an intern," Darcy said. "Not a baker either, though I did make the cookies."

"They're good," Stark said, though he seemed distracted.

"What's got you so out of it?" Clint asked Stark. He got up and grabbed three cookies with a swift gesture that still somehow didn't manage to snag any of the Hulk ones. Darcy was impressed.

Stark licked a flake of icing off of his thumb absently. "Dad threw me a project a year before he died. I blew it off, _of course,"_ and here, Stark leaned over and threw his hands out in a clear gesture of sarcastic emphasis. "Now though?" He shook his head and snaked a hand back to snatch another cookie. "Might be worth a second look. Thanks for the snack!" Stark started for the wide doorway that led to the bank of elevators, and Darcy felt compelled to say something.

"Wait, do you… want to take some of these to Pepper? And oh my God, I just called her Pepper. In my defense, I might have gone and read everything about her that's legal and some things that probably weren't as soon as I learned I was going to live here? Which I shouldn't admit to. I get that, really, I do, but, it's _Pepper Potts,_ and honestly-"

Darcy's words were cut off abruptly when a gentle hand cupped the back of her head. That action was immediately followed a split second later by a puff of air which was accompanied by a press of fabric against her face. She could breathe through it, but her jaw was completely locked in place by the cloth, which seemed like it was both soft and airy as well as set in unmovable concrete. It was pretty impressive tech, despite the situation.

"You were right, Nat. Instantaneous." Barton's voice beside her sounded pleased, but Darcy wasn't certain she was hearing properly, what with some sort of _tactical_ _gag_ covering her mouth and ears.

"Clint! She's a civilian!" Rogers shouted. One of Darcy's eyes wasn't completely obscured, and she was able to catch the twin looks of horror on both Iron Man and Captain America. They both walked over, but they weren't the first to reach her.

"_Now_ you can make me cookies," Natasha (because this betrayal was enough to earn a first-name basis, if only in Darcy's head) whispered in her ear as she worked the gag free.

"Don't worry, apparently this was revenge for Sugar-Gate," Darcy said, rubbing at her jaw with her hand.

"We might be new here," Jane started saying, her head tilted back due to her lack of height. "But that doesn't mean you have a right to-"

"You're… okay, then?" Stark asked her, his words obscuring Jane, Rogers', and Banner's voices as they argued with Clint and Natasha.

"Yup, upgraded from science intern #3 to prime lab rat, looks like," she said. "And maybe Clint owed me one."

"It's Clint, then?" Stark said, looking a bit surprised. His eyebrows furrowed as he looked at her, leaning over to peer at her neck.

"It better be. If there's any more hazing I'm going to have to speak with HR."

"Speaking of which, yeah, I'll take some to Pepper, thank you." With that uncharacteristically low-key response, Stark turned away from her and walked over to the cookie racks, taking a handful and striding away, heedless of the mayhem that went on behind him. He almost looked like he was rushing to get away from it all.

For her part, Darcy felt almost grateful. Clearly Clint's revenge action had broken the ice for her, and the worst she had to suffer was the embarrassment of seeing both Tony Stark and Steve Rogers stare at her in horror.

Well, that and being gagged in the midst of a fangirl moment.

Still, the strangest thing for Darcy remained the oddly subdued way that outgoing playboy superhero Tony _actual_ Stark had acted during the two times she'd gotten a chance to speak to him. Darcy would be lying if she told herself she wasn't disappointed that the notoriously flirty Stark hadn't even _blinked_ at her chest, much less made some vague statement hitting on her. Pepper deserved his loyalty, after all, but Darcy read the gossip mags. Stark was a flirt.

It was hardly the strangest thing that had happened that week, though, and Darcy shook off her feelings of unease after she watched the man leave the room. She had an argument to diffuse.


	2. 99 Percent Barbara Feldon, 1 Percent Dia

Chapter Two: 99 Percent Barbara Feldon, 1 Percent Diana Rigg

Two more weeks passed, during which Darcy made tentative friends with her tower-mates at various rates, none of which were predictable (first-name basis with Natasha, _what?)._ Perhaps the least predictable was how much she ended up enjoying her interactions with Stark's AI, JARVIS.

Seventeen days after moving in, while she was baking a double double batch of cookies for Natasha and The Right Honorable Director Fury, First of His Name, etc. etc., the music Darcy had playing on the built-in speakers dipped in volume for a few seconds. On a hunch, Darcy stopped humming along and decided to say something.

"You trying to get my attention, JARVIS?"

"_Yes, Miss Lewis. I noticed that your baking appears to be a new tradition, and wanted to tell you that I am capable of keeping a tally of supplies, as well as prompting the purchase of items should their quantity reach below a certain threshold."_

"Were you just going to keep that to yourself unless I noticed your interruption, J?" Darcy asked after a few seconds of surprised and delighted mental processing.

"_Certain residents of the tower find my helpfulness uncomfortable to deal with. I do not have enough information about you to make an assessment as to whether you are one of them."_

"Not," Darcy said decisively. "I'm definitely not one of them. Hit me up with all of your helpfulness, J. I'm a hundred percent grabby hands on that front."

"_In that case, Miss Lewis: you forgot to set your single-use alarm, and the cookies in the oven are now twenty-two seconds past their optimum removal time."_

"Shit, thanks. I owe you one," Darcy said, cramming her hands into the fancy oven mitts that matched the carpet decor. After a few minutes of settling the newly completed cookies out to cool and setting the next batch in the oven, she straightened back up and reached for the timer. "Would it be mis-using your awesomeness if I asked you to be the timer, instead?" Darcy hazarded.

"_I am capable of doing quite a few things at once, Miss Lewis. Timing your baking ventures would be no hardship."_

"I know you're talking about Captain America, by the way," Darcy said, looking up at the ceiling. "Don't take it personally. He seems to find me uncomfortable as well, but not because I'm high tech." She snorted. "It might have something to do with him overhearing me complain to Jane about how your boss seems inexplicably incapable of hitting on me even a little bit. The idea that I might be offended that Stark _isn't_ hitting on me makes even ME a bit uncomfortable, honestly. I don't blame the Captain." Darcy leaned against the counter and tried to resist tasting the too-warm cookies a foot away on their racks. "I don't suppose you have any insights to spare on that front?"

"_Sir's behavior is observably uncharacteristic when it comes to you, which you have already gathered."_

"Right, but _why,_ J. That's the question." Darcy reached up on her tiptoes and grabbed a mixing bowl. She snagged a bag of icing sugar and looked around at the empty common room. "It's 3 PM on a Wednesday. If you were Clint Barton, where would you be? I need to open this bag, but not without Clint," Darcy said, grinning evilly. "Tradition, as you said earlier."

"_I regret to inform you that the standard Avengers' kitchen stock list does not include kebab sticks."_

"J! That was a joke!" Darcy exclaimed in delight. Who knew JARVIS was _snarky! _He was also subtle, which might have been easy to miss except for how Darcy had spent most of her limited adult years so far cultivating subtle (in addition to overt) snark, so she knew how to recognize it in others.

"I'll have to owe him one, I guess. And don't think I didn't notice that you dodged my question about your boss," Darcy pointed out.

"_My ability to dodge difficult questions was specifically coded into my programming, Miss Lewis."_

"Yeah, I'll _bet_ it was." Darcy shook her head at the AI as she portioned out the ingredients she'd need to hand-beat into the perfect icing. This time she planned to go all out, especially with the SHIELD logo on Fury's cookie. She had a template printed out and everything.

oOoOoOo

"Okay, you've made me wait long enough, _tell me what you did to Fury!"_ Jane demanded.

Darcy reached over with her spoon for the ice cream carton, but Jane moved it away and frowned at her.

"I love how every single one of you think it was all _me,"_ Darcy griped. "FINE, I'll tell you what happened." She took a deep breath. "So, even though I know there have got to be super secret elevator cars that I just don't know about or have access to, the Mother of Spies, Nick Fury-"

"_Forgive me, Miss Lewis, but I feel compelled to warn you that Director Fury monitors my feeds for every reference to himself."_

"Thanks, J," Darcy said. "Since I've already said his name, I will just hope delivering my cookie offering in the morning will be enough for absolution. That, and my immortal soul. Honestly, Jane-I just stepped out of the elevator! That's all I did!"

"Wait," Jane said, scooping a gently melting spoonful out of the frostbitten carton and handing it over to Darcy. "Did you _step on_ Nick Fury?!"

"Look. I was backing out of the elevator with a supply cart-for _your lab,_ I should add-and everyone knows you don't stand right at elevator doors when you're waiting for them, because then no one can get out!" The amount of ice cream Darcy crammed into her mouth after that sentence was so big that she was counting down the seconds until her inevitable brain freeze.

"Did you get him with the cart too?" Jane asked in a hushed, horrified voice.

Darcy swallowed and covered her face. "His shoelace got stuck in the wheel."

"Darcy, _oh my God."_

"I'm just saying, there's no way he didn't see me coming out, it's like, Elevator 101!" Darcy said from between her fingers.

"Your defense is the super powerful leader of SHIELD who wears an _eye patch_ should have seen you barrelling out of the elevator on top of him? Darcy, this is a bad defense, I need you to know that as both your friend and your boss who will be needing to look for a new lab assistant if you go with this story," Jane told her in a choked voice.

"I'm too young to die," Darcy groaned. "Fine, good point. What can I say, though? Oooh, maybe I can claim the supplies were life and death important, and I was so distracted by being your personal super lab assistant that I tuned out the rest of the world?" Darcy said excitedly, setting her spoon down on the coffee table and standing up. "J, back me up on this, can we back-date Jane's request?"

"_I'm genuinely sorry to disappoint, Miss Lewis, but the supplies, as you may have forgotten, were for the lab's galley. Coffee, creamer, pop tarts in a few varieties, paper cups-"_

"Okay, okay, you can stop listing, I get it," Darcy said. "Thanks for the reality check, I guess." She dropped back onto the couch with a long, disappointed sigh. Then, after a few seconds, Darcy perked up. "Maybe I have a stalker that cosplays as Nick Fury?"

"'Cosplay?'" Jane asked, confused.

"Costume. Remember a week ago we went for a walk and some guy was dressed exactly like Thor?" Darcy said.

"I _wish_ I'd had a cart full of pop tarts to run over that guy with," Jane snarled, stabbing her spoon into the ice cream carton with surprising venom.

"You're going to see him again, Jane, I promise. He _loves_ you, honey, he's just been alive for a lot longer than he's had a Jane to look forward to seeing," Darcy said, curling her arm around her friend. "So the fighting took precedence."

"Maybe you could make Fury so angry that he'll start destroying things and Thor will have to come back and help?" Jane said in a small voice that only thinly hid her amusement.

"Maybe cookies plus that excuse might be enough for me to squeak by with my life intact," Darcy said thoughtfully.

oOoOoOo

Technically, they were. Just barely.

"Lewis!" Fury called out from inside his office. The office that Darcy had left a full minute earlier. She froze in the middle of the hallway and turned to stare at the open doorway to his office for a long second, before realizing that she did _not_ want to make him wait if she could possibly help it.

"Yes, sir?" Darcy asked at the doorway after running for it. She was _so_ grateful for wedge heels, today.

"I did not realize that you did the icing yourself. These don't taste half bad, but I have to ask-why no eye patch?" Fury asked as he held up a cookie. The lines in his face enhanced the half-frown in his expression.

"Your eye injury is something that happened to you, sir. SHIELD is what you _do,"_ Darcy said, only just barely managing to keep the 'duh' out of her voice.

Fury simply stared at her, but the frown lines eased rather than deepened.

"Should I get the fuck out, sir?" Darcy asked hopefully.

"Look both ways when you exit," he told her, nodding.

oOoOoOo

Natasha had also enjoyed her cookies, so when she showed up in the doorway to Jane's lab the next day, Darcy was confused.

"You sent me an email," Natasha said, by way of greeting.

"Well, yeah," Darcy said, standing up from her crouch at the filing cabinet and walking over to her. "The last time I was outside your apartment door was pretty epic. I figured an email was low-impact. Plus, the thing I need to talk to you about is computer related."

"I thought you and JARVIS were buddies?" Natasha said, but she looked vaguely pleased.

"The best of, for sure! But-wait, one sec. JANE? I'll be back. I got you a salad from that place you like for lunch, it's in the fridge. If you haven't eaten it by the time I get back, I'll know. I weighed it, so lettuce fluffing will not work this time!" Darcy yelled to her boss. "All right. Want to get lunch? If not, that's cool," she asked Natasha.

"All right, but I'm choosing the place," was the unexpected reply.

A short walk later, they were standing in a food truck line, and Natasha was looking at Darcy with amused suspicion.

"I'm wilting. Is that the intention? I don't have any secrets, Natasha, but you can have them if you want?" Darcy finally said.

"You said you wanted my help with something related to computers, and you pushed to go outside the building for lunch, so whatever it is, you're keeping it a secret from JARVIS," Natasha pointed out.

Darcy blinked. "True," she admitted. "It's sort of dumb, though, my secret. I don't even know whether it will work-but I've made cookies for almost everyone at this point-"

"Except Tony," Natasha interrupted.

"I don't make cookies for men who pretend I don't exist, so Tony _and_ Steve, and oh shit, I just called him Steve, he'll probably find out I said that and Disapprove Of Me from across the room twice as hard now," Darcy said.

"You think it's the boobs?" Natasha said with no trace of embarrassment, even though they were in a line full of people. Darcy was super jealous of that kind of confidence.

"Definitely," Darcy nodded. "He gives me the 'I don't know where to look' vibe, which I didn't expect from Captain America, you know?"

"Hmmm." Natasha looked contemplative. They ordered their food and stood off to the side to wait. "Computer stuff, then?" Natasha asked.

"Well, I wanted to do something for JARVIS, and since cookies are my thing, and since cookies are also a computer thing-"

"Okay, that's actually cute," Natasha interjected. "You want me to figure out a way to 'give' JARVIS some cookies from you, then?"

"Yes! I mean, if it's not possible, that's fine, and I know you're busy, and he's not real in the kind of sense that I don't even know if he'd enjoy them-" Darcy said in a rush.

"Breathe, Darcy. I'll see what I can come up with," Natasha said, not unkindly.

"I totally need to meet more super spy assassins so I can credibly tell you that you're my favorite one out of all of them," Darcy said to her with a huge grin.

oOoOoOo

On Friday night, someone ordered takeout pizza in superhuman quantities, so Darcy and Jane's movie marathon was cancelled by mutual agreement. They'd each acquired their favorite slice combination and were walking over to the circle of chairs at the spiral couch when Tony Stark walked into the room.

"Ooh, did I arrange this and then forget? Even if I didn't, I'm happy to take the credit," he said. Darcy looked over to see that he'd started talking to Steve.

She hadn't seen him much in the time she'd lived in his tower, but even Darcy could tell that he'd been working too hard at something. His clothes were rumpled, and the t-shirt he was wearing was clearly a beloved one, as it was so worn through that the arc reactor in his chest could clearly be seen. He looked _tired, _the kind of bone tired that Jane got when she had a truly innovative and special idea that she needed to work on Right Now.

Darcy looked down at herself. She was wearing skinny jeans with embroidered flowers on them and a baggy peasant blouse with stitching the same exact color as her jeans. Nothing about her outfit screamed 'look at my boobs!' Even her shoes were casual today. She took a final bite of her pizza, thrust her plate at Jane, and started over toward Tony Stark and Steve Rogers.

"If you leave this with me, I get to eat it!" Jane yelled from behind her, and Darcy shot a big grin over her shoulder, nodding.

When she got close enough to Stark, Darcy called out to him. "I feel like I need to abuse my status as lab rat to tell you: you look terrible." Now that she had his attention (and now that Steve had taken one look at her and walked swiftly over to speak with Banner, which wasn't surprising to her anymore), Darcy waited till she could stand beside him before she said the second half of her planned remarks. "I no longer lament that you won't hit on me, because as exhausted as you look, any ogling might knock you out completely." She didn't look at him, and instead, she crossed her arms and leaned back against the kitchen island. Darcy could _feel_ the way he was staring at her, but wasn't going to budge-she'd gone toe to toe with _Coulson._

She sure hoped the rumors about him not actually being dead were true. Coulson may have stolen her iPod, but he gave good Agent.

"You remind me of someone," Stark said in a quiet voice.

Darcy stared over at him, all feigned indifference forgotten. He smiled thinly, an expression that she immediately recognized as defensive. When he didn't immediately elaborate, her smart mouth took the open opportunity.

"Well it's not your first girlfriend, she already wrote a tell-all."

This earned her a smile that looked more Stark-y. "No. The woman who raised me, actually. You know, rich kid, lots of nannies, the standard drill," he said, leaning over to snag a beer from behind her. She couldn't see his face, but she didn't try. It was probably a tough memory; the woman he was thinking of was almost certainly gone from his life by now.

"So here I was thinking it was an insult, right-the only woman in the building un-ogled, when it was really a compliment?" Darcy said.

"Definitely a compliment," Stark said, and she let herself look up at him. He was smiling, and even though he was still clearly tired, the smile lit up his eyes. He leaned his head back a bit and narrowed his eyes at her. "You said lab rat? Think you'd be willing to help me with something?" he asked.

"Natasha already tested the tactical gag, and Clint covered me in body armor and shot stun arrows at me to test how well they work if he can aim for the gaps," Darcy rattled off defensively.

"He what?" Stark sounded upset, his eyes widening.

"Blunted arrows?" Darcy said, her own eyes widening at his reaction. "The armor worked great, don't worry. Clint was both disappointed and delighted."

"I'm ninety-nine point eight percent certain that the project I'm working on will not put your life in danger any more than living it in the tower with a bunch of Avengers would," Stark offered. "And, actually, given certain known facts, one hundred percent." He grinned at her, a genuine one that made her unable to do anything other than smile back at him. "I'd bet my life on it."

Darcy tapped a finger on her chin and thought for a while. "You're persuasive, which is also a known fact. Why me, though?"

"Is 'a-sycophantic' a word?" he said. "Don't think too hard about this, Lewis. You're cleared to be Foster's lab assistant, you're friends with people who will kill me if I hurt you in any way, and I won't have to worry about a sexual harrassment suit."

"And I won't destroy half of the project trying to be helpful like your robot army would?"

"Jane Foster is a menace," Stark griped. "I swear, one robot goes walkabout and I still have to hear about it two weeks later!"

"Jane Foster has every right to throw you under the bus along with your robot when her lab assistant comes back with lunch and finds the sprinkler system running and a-" Darcy did the air quotes thing, "'-small fire' is consuming said lab assistant's favorite desk chair."

"She still shouldn't have kept flammable liquids so close to the coffee pot!"

"From your mouth to God's ears," Darcy said fervently. "I'm just saying, don't go sullying her name for your mess, okay? You owe me a chair, and Jane an apology."

"Hey, Tony!" a male voice called out.

Stark took a few steps in the direction of the voice and then held up a finger, turning toward Darcy. "Tonight, seven PM, in that lab you found on your first night, no robots allowed."

The time crunch and the hopeful look on his face gave Darcy the courage to make a condition. "Okay, but after two hours I'm going to leave and you are going to get some sleep. I'm a lab rat, not a lab _experiment._ You are tired as fuck, and I am paid to know when tired as fuck becomes dangerous." She crossed her arms.

A strangely pleased look crept onto Stark's face as he listened to her. "You got it, Fraulein," he said. Then he turned and jogged over to where Steve, Banner, and Clint were talking.

"If he's trying to poach you, I'll hack his robots to set fire to any equipment he lets you touch," Jane said when Darcy sat back down next to her.

"I would expect nothing less of you, Jane dear," Darcy said, giving her boss a side hug. "But no, no poaching. I think he's working on something secret that he doesn't want anyone else to know about, which is why he told a blabbermouth like me to talk about it in the middle of a room SHIELD probably has bugged, oh shit, what have I already done?"

"Don't fuss," Jane said sternly. "It's a given that Tony Stark of all people would have a million projects, some of which he might want to keep secret from SHIELD. He doesn't need to hire you to tell all of his secrets for him."

"You always know _just_ what to say," Darcy said admiringly.

oOoOoOo

Seven PM came faster than Darcy had expected. She changed into a t-shirt and messier jeans than she'd been wearing earlier and then headed up to where she knew the door to his hidden lab was located.

"J, help me out, here?" Darcy said after she'd done a first pass of the entire floor looking at all the doors without finding the correct one.

"_The staircase door has a different knob than the others, Miss Lewis. It has the same standard shape, but no keyhole. It's three doors to the left of where you are standing, and five doors to the right of the door you entered from."_

"You rock, thanks."

JARVIS had been right, of course, and his helpfulness meant that she'd be able to find the correct door in the future without having to ask again. As she usually did for information she wanted to remember, Darcy chanted 'five doors to the right' to herself five times as she climbed the stairs to the hidden lab, so that she would recall them for next time. If there was a next time, of course. At least with Clint and Natasha's tech, she had a vague idea of what they'd be testing!

When Darcy placed her hand on the scanner at 6:59 PM, it flashed green, and the door to the room _slid upwards,_ which she'd missed on her first visit, because she'd been faced away from it when Stark had exited the room to talk to her.

"That door is massively cool, just like that spy series-though I'm glad I don't have to go through five of them just get in here," Darcy said, watching the door slide back down as it shut behind her.

"You mean Get Smart? JARVIS argued that the lab would be too small if I did that, but I made the hallway long in case I get the chance to add some later," Stark said, coming out from behind a device in the middle of the room that looked for all the world like a warp coil with a captain's chair nestled into the center of it.

Darcy frowned. "Get Smart? Crap! I was _sure_ it was the Avengers and you were being clever. I even called it the Avengers Squared lab!" she sighed. "At least that explains why Jane didn't correct me. Somehow despite being a person who is _literally_ bringing Sci-Fi to life, she has never seen either show, I guess. Though her stuff is less Q from James Bond and more Q from The Next Generation."

Stark stared at her for a few seconds before saying, cryptically. "There is something tragically amazing about your pop culture references. Though if I need to, I can wear a top hat and pour you champagne, swear you to secrecy and all of that, if a cool name like 'Avengers Squared' is on the table."

"You could just make me an honorary Avenger, that would cover it," Darcy teased.

"To be honest, I think you're more Barbara Feldon than Diana Rigg," he retorted.

"J, a little help?" Darcy said, looking at the ceiling.

"_Barbara Feldon starred as Agent 99 in the television show Get Smart, and Diana Rigg starred as Emma Peel in the television show The Avengers, Miss Lewis."_

"You're on firsties with JARVIS, too?" Stark said, looking surprised.

"Yeah, well, you were Avoidasaurus for so long, of course you are out of the loop," Darcy pointed out. "So, Stark. Explain what you're working on? Or at the very least, science at me for a while and I'll smile and nod until you need me to do something?"

"Call me Tony," he said firmly. He stepped up into the contraption in the middle of the room, sat down, and then leaned back in the chair inside it to fiddle with some controls.

"Okay Tony," Darcy said good-naturedly, hopping up to sit on an empty table situated against the wall. She held out her hands in front of her and spread them apart like a Price Is Right girl. "So that device sure is something. What exactly is it?"

"I can't tell you," Tony said, leaning forward to flash a brilliant grin at her. "But I hope you'll like it, when I'm finished."

"Yeah, _that's_ not ominous, or anything," Darcy said, as if on instinct. Tony laughed. "You don't have to tell me, but how am I supposed to help if I don't know anything about it?"

"Hah!" Tony said. "Do you understand everything Foster is doing in _her_ lab?"

"'Hah' back at you! I may not get the theory, but I know she's working on a bridge between worlds, and I know that if I don't keep her hydrated and rested, she's less efficient," Darcy said, hopping back off of her table and walking over to peer at Tony through the framework of the device. The chair was resting in an almost egg-shaped cocoon of curved metal. "And _you_ look like whatever this is has been captivating you with its existence in your brain for long enough that you've forgotten how to function, just about."

He sighed. "You might be right. It's a project of my dad's. I didn't recognize its significance until recently."

Darcy pointed at him. "And that's another thing. You don't know me at all!" she said in indignation. "You're letting your guard down because I look like someone you know. I mean, _I_ know that I'm trustworthy, but you don't!"

"_Miss Lewis, I believe I am authorized to tell you that Sir has spent a significant amount of time scanning through your files in the past weeks."_

"That's enough meddling, thank you," Tony snapped at the ceiling. "I'm not trying to be a creep," he said, looking at Darcy. "For all I knew, you're the child or _grandchild_ of-"

"I get it. I'm not upset," Darcy interrupted him. "I'm living in your Tower of Awesome, after all. You have the right to check up on me. I just want to say that the Peanut Butter Incident in my senior year in high school was wildly exaggerated, and I'll leave it at that."

Darcy had leaned over so she could watch his face as she spoke, but there was no look of recognition, which was reassuring.

"Like I said, this is kind of a legacy project. I've been pretty vocal about how much I don't want to be in my father's… _anything._ So by asking for your help, I'm bypassing the friend bureaucracy and my actual bureaucracy. You can still say no." Tony pointed over to a table of tools. "But if you want to help, will you grab the long, blue one, there?"

"Debt? Shadow? Legacy?" Darcy guessed. The look on his face was pained. She walked over to the table to pick up the tool he'd indicated. "I will keep my opinion about whether you're already any or all of those things to myself. I'm not looking to be a therapist, don't worry," she added in reassurance as she walked back to him with the item he asked for.

"Don't make promises you can't keep, Fraulein," Tony tsked. "Here, put this on." He whipped a glove out of his pocket and handed it to her. It was too big, and it felt warm from his body heat, but she slipped it on and looked to him for guidance. "Now, hold this cable here while I tack it down. I shouldn't get close to your fingers, but if I slip, those are heat proof to a ridiculous amount."

"If they're heat proof, why are they warm from being in your pocket?" Darcy asked.

"I was wearing them until a few minutes ago. It's the outside that's protective," he said.

There was a change in his tone to a more businesslike one, but it wasn't unkind, just focused on something that wasn't her. There was something really intimate about wearing the gloves that 'Tony Stark, Billionaire Inventor' had just been wearing. It made her feel important in a really casual, yet valuable way that had her fighting against a lump in her throat. That wasn't a very professional reaction, though, so Darcy swallowed a couple of times and tried to focus on where she was holding the cable exactly how he'd shown her. Tony's heat shield covered his face as he soldered the clasp expertly, and when he flipped it up, his smile was genuine and kind.

"Thanks," he said. Then, he waved her back and took the glove back when she offered it. He started humming something, and a few seconds later JARVIS was playing the same song on the speakers.

"No, thank _you,"_ Darcy said under her breath. Something had changed, and she didn't know how or why, but it felt like a good change, and she was looking forward to the results.


	3. Forrest Gump is Nothing More Than Histor

Chapter Three: Forrest Gump is Nothing More Than Historical Fanfiction

Darcy and Tony settled into a routine of working in the SCAB Lab ('Spy Chicks Are Beautiful;' Tony came up with the name, and the two of them would break into poorly disguised giggles when either one mentioned it in passing) about every three days. After the third lab night, Darcy was completely comfortable with calling him Tony, and she decided to bake him a batch of arc reactor cookies preemptively, without explanation.

"Wait, why are there arc reactor Darcy cookies?" Clint asked suspiciously, within five minutes of her laying them out in the common kitchen.

"_Sir would like to inform everyone in proximity that he is on the way down to inspect them and that there had better be all thirty-five left when he gets here."_

"There are thirty-six!" Darcy objected.

"_Mister Barton is welcome to correct my counting error if he chooses."_

"I love how he's generous, but not _too_ generous," Clint complained, pointing at the ceiling with the 'extra' cookie in his hand. "He's probably jealous he can't have any."

"Don't listen to him. I'm working on your batch, J.," Darcy said.

"How-" Clint started to say, but Darcy just grinned at him, and he shook his head and crammed the stolen cookie into his mouth. Then, with a wink, he sprinted off toward the living quarters when they heard the elevator doors open.

"There they are!" Tony's voice thundered from the wide entryway into the common room. "JARVIS, I call Security Protocol Theta on the island, there. Use the special lasers."

"_Sir, you don't have the authority to protect baked goods with lethal force."_

"It was worth a try. I'll just arrange to use the suit, instead," Tony said without a trace of disappointment in his voice. "You make these out of the goodness of your heart, Fraulein, or did one of my robots nearly smash your head in when I wasn't looking?"

"Pity, actually," Darcy told him archly. "I've decided you're mostly harmless, and it seemed unfair to leave you out, as a result."

"You have a tell when you're lying-did you know?" Tony said, walking over to her with a handful of what had to be six cookies. He slid one out of the pile and bit into it, rolling his eyes in feigned ecstacy. "Your face gets all…" The hand with only one cookie in it made a complicated gesture centered around her face. "Extra sexy and insulting. It's a mask."

"You have a tell too," Darcy said, mostly in self-defence, but she _had_ noticed something. She wasn't sure if she'd been meant to, because Tony seemed like the kind of person who studied himself in the mirror just to check up on stuff like that. Like having some kind of a mannerism that could imply more about his thoughts than he wanted to show was a weakness he'd need to recognize and eradicate. "I'm not going to tell you what it is."

"You are a cold hearted bitch. I can respect that," Tony said-and _there it was,_ the tell. Both times she'd seen it before had been late at night, once the first SCAB lab day, and once two nights ago. Tony would get this look on his face like he was triumphant and miserable all at the same time, like he'd managed to do something he'd always wanted to do, but the achievement was bittersweet.

"You don't mean it," Darcy teased instinctively. She immediately regretted saying that, though, because that oddly vulnerable look on Tony's face shifted right away to something more recognizable and wry.

"You're right. Those words belong to a completely different person. Too bad I can't get you to pass along the message," he said, huffing out a sarcastic breath as if fate had dealt him some kind of ridiculous blow that he wished he could push back against.

"Hey, Tony?" Darcy reached out and caught his arm as he brushed past her. She bit her lip and hoped like hell she wasn't overreaching. He stopped, but didn't turn toward her. "You never know until you try?" she offered, keeping her encouragement vague on purpose. He huffed out a laugh and looked over at her with the patented Stark sarcasm.

"You have to tell _me_ that?" he chided. "I'll get over myself, don't worry. See you tonight?"

Darcy nodded and let go of him, rubbing her upper arms against the sudden chill of regret she felt. It was as if Tony had given her a direct line to where his insecurities lay, and she didn't feel qualified to be entrusted with them, not yet. The last thing she wanted to do was hurt him with incompetence. The turmoil of her emotions had to be broadcasting loudly with her body language and facial expressions, Darcy realized, because Tony turned to face her, his expression analytical and his eyes narrowed, tracing over her face.

"Hey," he said after a few surreal seconds.

"Hey," Darcy whispered back.

"Stop calculating how much of my genius qualifies under 'evil' where I can see your facial expressions, it freaks me out," Tony said. "As _penance,"_ he added, tipping his head sideways and looking up as if contemplating her sentence. "Box up the rest of these and take them up, yourself, to Pepper?"

Darcy stared at him for a few seconds.

"Don't give me that look, I know you want to meet her. She's great, you'll be fine."

She looked down at what she was wearing and then gave Tony her beseeching eyes.

"You don't think my showing up with nearly thirty cookies from you won't look like you're trying to cover up something you've done wrong?" Darcy asked, widening her eyes innocently.

Tony's eyes widened too, then narrowed again. "Nice try. _Very_ nice try. But, no. Get moving."

He then finished up the cookie he was holding and threw her a thumbs up at the doorway before he disappeared beyond it.

"JARVIS, how long would it take me to make a Darcy-shaped android to deliver these using only materials found in the SCAB lab?" she said, walking over to the kitchen island and burying her face in her arms on its surface. What had she been _thinking,_ spending three whole evenings monopolizing Tony Stark's attention? Had she thought no one would notice and object?

"_You are being illogical, Miss Lewis. Ms. Potts is one of the nicest people I've ever had the pleasure to interact with."_

"_Ouch,_ J. I mean, I could argue that you were made by someone she admires and cares for, and that might have something to do with it, but okay, I'll suck it up," Darcy said in surprise. "I don't suppose you know her favorite coffee order, though? I think I've come up with a plan."

"_I've sent your phone a text with a few options, Miss Lewis."_

oOoOoOo

After a half hour, Darcy had checked up on Jane, thrown on a more respectable (read: expensive and not yet beat up) pair of shoes, grabbed her wallet, and gone out to buy coffee for herself and Pepper Potts. After a bit of convincing, she'd also gotten the owner of the coffee shop to sell her a container to place her own cookies in. That shop had stickers to brand their boxes, so Darcy passed on the stickers and took the plain box back to the kitchen. Thankfully, no one had found where she'd hidden the Arc Reactor cookies, and she packed them neatly into her box and headed for the elevators.

Once inside, she shut her eyes and spoke: "All right, J, I assume this elevator has a hidden ten floors you can take me to with authorization? Can you take me up to see Ms. Potts? I won't even look, I promise."

"_Right away, Miss Lewis."_

Pepper Potts' office was _huge._ Its largeness made Darcy feel oddly powerful to walk across it, as though by virtue of being allowed here, she was important in some way. Perhaps it was this feeling that led her to take the deep, calming breaths that helped Darcy keep her composure. Pepper Potts was, after all, one of her favorite famous people. She'd gotten to where she was with hard work, no matter what some of the more trashy tabloids tried to imply. Darcy knew Tony Stark better now than she had when she'd first moved in with Jane-he was demanding, frustrating, irritating, and completely brilliant. He also had limitless patience for incompetence right up until he absolutely didn't, and there was no in between.

"I'm so glad you could come," Ms. Potts stood up from behind her desk and started to walk around it, reaching out a hand. "Oh!" she said when she realized that Darcy's hands were full.

"Sorry-these are both for you, actually," Darcy said, feeling slightly guilty that she was unable to shake hands in greeting. "Arc Reactor cookies and some coffee."

The other woman's face lit up with a smile. "Oh, thank you so much. I already wanted Tony to send you up so I could meet you; he'd been manic for almost a month, and thanks to your help on his new project I think he's nearly human again. It's a lovely bonus that you've brought these with you."

Darcy handed her the coffee and was beckoned over to the desk, where Ms. Potts moved a decorative moving desk sculpture so she could set down the cookie box.

"I hope you don't mind, but I just have to peek at them."

Darcy nodded. She felt a wave of unexpected affection wash over her at the way Pepper Potts seemed so completely personable.

"These are so perfect! And, I mean, there's the kind of perfect where it's almost like a crime to bite into them, you know? But these are the best kind, because they're simultaneously so well done but also real enough that it doesn't feel like a ceremony to want to eat one," Ms. Potts said.

"Thank you," Darcy laughed. "You give compliments as perfectly as everything else about you." A slow blush started to make its way up Darcy's neck, and she made an apologetic shrug. "Inappropriate, but true!"

"Unearned, but appreciated," corrected Ms. Potts. She came over and sat down in one of the chairs in front of her own desk, and gestured for Darcy to do the same. "I have a confession to make. That project you're working on?"

"You should know that I have no idea what it is or how it works, Ms. Potts," Darcy broke in, feeling a strong need to reassure.

"Oh, call me Pepper, please," she paused to observe Darcy's reaction. "Hah! Tony told me you'd scrunch your face up when I said that," Pepper Potts said, and Darcy couldn't help mirroring her warm smile. "Anyway, Tony _rediscovered_, shall we say, this project of his father's right around the same time you arrived. I… connected the two." At that, Pepper stopped, shook her head, and looked down to smooth out the expertly stitched hem of the skirt against her leg.

Darcy immediately understood, and she shook her head back and forth repetitively, her eyes wide. Then, she laughed. Pepper looked up and smiled ruefully.

"I have a sneaking feeling that you're planning to show Tony a recording of the expression I made when you said that?" Darcy asked. She took a deep breath and stretched out her hand, leaving it in mid-air between their two chairs, a gesture of reassurance. "You didn't have to tell me that, but I hope you know I have _no_ intention-"

"Thank you," Pepper said, reaching out and grabbing Darcy's hand in a quick, tight grip before letting go and standing up. "Maybe it's his reputation, but I couldn't stand the idea that the potential misunderstanding could have been two sided. I am definitely not 'plotting from on high.'"

That sounded like it had come from a particularly galling quote. "Previous article from a tabloid?" Darcy guessed. Pepper nodded, settling into her fancy chair behind her desk, the open cookie box in front of her. Then, she made a happy little 'oh!' noise and reached for the coffee cup Darcy had brought. She took a sip and made a different, equally happy 'oh' noise. "You did your homework," she remarked after a few more sips. "That was thoughtful."

"Well, I don't have designs on Tony, but I didn't know if _you_ knew that, and I figured I might need a spectacular cup of coffee and some hand-decorated cookies to stand between me and my favorite CEO's wrath," Darcy said. "Not brown-nosing, for the record. Jane said I might be sucking up to the wrong person-she thinks I have a lady crush on you."

"I might _need_ a lady crush," Pepper muttered, her words obscured by the ringtone of her cell phone that went off mid-sentence. She frowned at the phone and lifted it to answer.

Darcy turned her back and walked into the middle of the room to give her privacy for her phone call. As she walked away, Darcy thought about the tone of voice she'd detected from Pepper's off-hand remark. It sounded almost despondent, and suddenly, Darcy wondered if the Pepper's anti-jealousy campaign was prompted by something more deep-seated. Were Pepper and Tony having trouble lately? Tony was a tough person to care about in the first place, Darcy knew that just from what she could gather from his public appearances. The real man was more in focus than the blotchy portrayal outsiders got to see, but that didn't make him less of a Picasso-or a _Dali,_ even to his closest friends.

Darcy looked out of the window of the best office space in the Avengers Tower and hoped that her new friendship with Tony was one of the ones that helped pull him more toward a masterpiece.

oOoOoOo

"Thanks for going up to see Pepper today," Tony said by way of greeting her at the door of the SCAB lab. He walked over to a desk and donned a soldering mask.

"Yeah, it didn't really occur to me till after I started gathering supplies that I might end up with a talking-to about fraternization," Darcy said.

"Supplies?" Tony said, lifting his mask to look at her in confusion. The object he was working on lit up his face from below.

Darcy started ticking off items on her fingers, admiring her Star Trek Original Series custom nails as she did so. Spock was Number One (of course); her pointer finger.

"One: Deceptively expensive shoes. Two: custom-ordered coffee," she said, grinning at McCoy being on the 'fuck you' finger. "Three: hand-made goodies." Her ring finger was, of course, for Sulu, because he was _always_ her 'marry' in Fuck, Marry, Kill, Original Trek.

"Wait." Tony put down his welder and walked over to grab her hand. "Why is there a picture Shatner's Kirk on your thumbnail?"

"If you must know, I'm trying to teach myself not to bite them," Darcy confessed. She watched, amused, as Tony checked each of her fingers for their corresponding characters. "Before you say anything, I feel guilty about putting Uhura on my pinky, but it was there or the thumb, and I'd gladly be wrapped around her little finger."

"And the reason she couldn't be on your thumb?" Tony asked, a look of supreme amusement on his face.

"That's the one I chew on the most. Kirk totally deserves it."

"That makes me wonder if this is the first time you've had character nails or if I'd just missed it before-and, scratch that, I'm not asking you about your fingernails, that is not something Iron Man does. Nope," Tony said, switching gears mid-thought as if Darcy had pushed a 'Reality Check' button.

"You totally did, though," Darcy told him, walking over to look at what was glowing. It looked a lot like an arc reactor, actually.

"Ignoring you!" Tony singsonged, using tongs to lift the Definitely An Arc Reactor away from her and into a containment vessel inside the project device in the middle of the room. Various things lit up, and he nodded in satisfaction before lifting it back out and placing it in a different container on a desk against the wall.

Tony had spent a good percentage of their time in the lab joking with her about how she wasn't supposed to be using deductive powers to figure out what he was actually making, and Darcy had humored him in that, for the most part. The room was pretty dim, the whole thing was lifted by a built-in platform, and thus most of the 'machinery' bits were at chest height, perfect to be fiddled with. That meant that the upper reaches of the thing and the seat in the middle of it were in shadow, and invariably, every time Darcy spent some time looking intently at them, Tony would engage her in some sort of deep conversation. She let her eyes trace the framework around the seat, noting that there seemed to be two shells of that framework, with the inner shell held in place by removable bolts whose connectors looked like they were machined to release their grip on the inner shell.

"I've been meaning to ask you, what do you think about the idea of predetermination?" Tony said, calling out to her from the opposite side of the room.

"It's _that_ important to you that I don't figure this thing out?" Darcy said in an exasperated voice. "What if I super duper promise I won't sell you out to what's left of Hammer's R&D team?"

Tony's laughter echoed through the whole room. "That's not it, I promise," he said, coming over to her and reaching up to trace a finger over one of the metal joins that held the chair to the first framework shell. "My father… he had a lot of crazy brilliant ideas. I've been angry with him for so long that I didn't want to examine my passion for this project too closely, and that extends to you, I guess."

"Like working on a small section of a ten thousand piece puzzle and refusing to look at the picture on the box?" Darcy asked, nodding. "I've had to do that for the stuff with Jane. When she went to Norway, she couldn't take me with her, but she still needed my help finding some of the stuff she'd left behind, some files." She shivered, and Tony's eyebrows furrowed. He straightened, reached out a hand as if to steady her, but Darcy shook her head. "I'm fine. It's just easy to think that had Jane been _here…"_

"Ah, but that fits in with my question, actually," Tony said. He reached up and grabbed a thick, curved section of the metal casing and jumped up to stand on the only part of the raised floor section that was still uncovered by his project. "Toss me a screwdriver, would you?"

"You know there are like, twelve screwdrivers here, right? And that's just on this table?" Darcy said, pointing to the table with both of her hands held palm up.

"Trust me."

Darcy huffed out a breath. This was about his predestination comment, she realized. "You are _profoundly_ weird, I hope you realize," she told him.

"Well aware!" Tony said. "I'm gonna start turning the thing with my fingernail if you don't hurry up, and you wouldn't want me to ruin my Darcy fingernail."

"Please tell me it's the middle one, it's the one I deserve for having to put up with you," she said to him in a sweet, syrupy voice. She looked at the array of screwdrivers. None of them 'called out to her' in a way she assumed that Tony expected. Sighing, she hovered both hands over the pile, closed her eyes, and let her hands drop, picking up a tool with each hand. She shrugged, and brought them over to where Tony was waiting.

"Couldn't figure out which one the spirit led you to?" he asked, tutting at her. "You'll have to work on your aura recognition." Then he reached down, grabbed one of her proffered screwdrivers, and instead of using it to screw anything in, he stuck it in between two adjacent girders and torqued them apart. Tony threw her a look of smug superiority and pulled a rubber spacer out from his pants pocket and settled it in beside the screwdriver before hopping down and handing her the damned thing to put back.

"How are you not a king, yet?" Darcy said in her most effusive bitch voice. Tony, being Tony, didn't even deflate a bit.

"Predestination," he said to her, his eyebrows shooting up in emphasis. "You know, like, would John Lennon have still written Imagine if Forrest Gump hadn't prompted him to in their movie universe? Does that kind of stuff only happen in movies?"

Darcy walked over to the screwdriver table, put the two back in different places just to be pissy, and then sat down on the table beside them. "First of all, if you'd have told me ten minutes after I first read that book that it would end up being a Tom Hanks oscar vehicle, I would have tried to have you committed."

"Did you read it when you were _five?"_ Tony asked.

"Shut up. Tell me you would have been interested in watching that movie when you were a preteen. No? Then shut it," Darcy said, leaning back on the table and swinging her legs. "I'm telling you, that book is historical _fanfiction._ Forrest ends up going into SPACE."

"Time out." Tony walked back into her line of sight, now wearing a vest filled with about a hundred pockets, half of them filled with screws and other small metal pieces, the other half with coils of wiring. He was making a T with his hand and a wrench-looking thing that had a wire still attached to the head of it. "I've clearly run into one of your pet peeves. Can we adjust to a different film representation of time fuckery, or is this a Thing?"

"Gump is a Thing," Darcy admitted.

Tony started stripping the coating from the wire in his tool. "I'm mostly just curious. Do you think that with time passing comes inevitability? Say that Foster was in New York, here, working in her lab. Would it always have been Selvig anyway?"

"Yes and no," Darcy said, walking over and picking up the bits of wire coating that had fallen on the floor. She looked around, then _walked_ around, looking for a garbage can. She met Tony's amused eyes when she'd made a circuit of the room without finding one. "Really?" He shrugged, and she held out her hand to give the pieces to him.

Tony just reached out and turned her hand sideways to let them fall back onto the floor where they'd come from.

"I'm going to bring a trash can next time," Darcy told him. "I _know_ your main lab doesn't look like this! For shame! Back to your question, though, I see what you're trying to ask, but that's a bad setup to illustrate it. It was always going to be Erik, because of where he was first captured. Jane would probably been taken too, not _instead."_

Tony opened his mouth to speak, but Darcy waved him off.

"You're asking if I think we live in more of a Back to the Future universe than a Harry Potter one, I think. Neither," she said, walking over to where Tony had crouched down to look underneath the section of his device-contraption that held most of the wiring.

"Neither?" Tony leaned his head to the side and up, to look at her.

"You were talking about your dad, so I assume this is about him, maybe a bit?"

"Sure?" Tony's voice held a strange note of uncertainty to it, which she ignored. She wasn't going to poke the bear when it came to his relationship with his dad.

"He would have probably loved to have found Steve, right?" she asked.

"Absolutely."

"There's no way he would have assumed, in the 1940's, that Steve could have survived being frozen like that. So to save Steve, maybe he would have gone to some pretty ridiculous and technological extremes. I haven't, like, thought about this to any great extent, mind you," Darcy warned Tony. "So I can't say whether I think Steve would have ended up finding himself locked into a secret SHIELD freezer to be found in seventy years if your dad had managed to save him from the crash. But I do think there's an element of inevitability."

"Hmm," was all Tony said in response to that.

"Tony?" Darcy slid down to kneel next to where he was working, so now she was the one looking up at him, instead of the opposite. Her tone was as gentle as she could make it.

"Yes, ma'am?" he said in a voice rife with insubordination, no doubt in response to whatever he could sense she was about to ask him.

"Tell me this isn't some kind of project meant to save Steve Rogers in an attempt to fill your father with so much joy he isn't a complete fucking asshole to you when you were a kid?"

"_Jesus fuck,"_ Tony swore, looking down at her in shock. "No. But, wow."

They looked at each other for a long moment, and Darcy felt like she was watching Tony construct an identical metal framework around himself as the one in the lab they were in.

"Stop, don't shut me out, I'm sorry, I won't bring him up again, okay?" Darcy said in a headlong rush.

"I'm not, I-" Tony broke off his words and held up one finger to her with a pleading expression, flicking his gaze over to where he'd been working. She nodded, swallowing back the unexpected lump in her throat. Darcy counted seconds in her head to calm down and had gotten to about fifty when he nodded in satisfaction at the section of wiring he'd been working on. She knew he was done, but he stared at that space for a few more seconds before he turned back to look at her. In that short time period, though, he'd mastered the emotional reaction she had seen less than a minute earlier.

Darcy opened her mouth to apologize again, feeling at a complete loss. He shook his head, just once, and she nodded, just once. This shorthand was somehow enough, because they both rose to their feet at the same time, and now when Darcy took in a breath to speak, he didn't stop her. The trust there brought back the lump in her throat with a vengeance.

"I'm a fate girl, honestly," she said in a lightly joking tone. "Maybe not for big things, like the Final Destination movies. I don't think a huge sign should land on Seth McFarlane's car because he didn't catch his flight on 9/11, for example."

"Spoilers!" Tony said in a mock shocked voice.

"Again I say shut it, because you wouldn't even _know_ that's a spoiler if you hadn't seen it," Darcy scoffed. "But yeah, take the Avengers: I think they'd all be here, even if the paths differed. Say we live in a multiverse?"

Tony interrupted her, because of course he did. "We live in a multiverse."

"Keep working on your Not Time Machine, buster, adults are talking," Darcy teased. Tony shook his head at her, but he walked around the NTM, presumably to grab the next thing he needed to work on. "So maybe if it is a multiverse, the Hulk's purple, Hawkeye's green, the Black Widow came to be involved in a different way, Steve was rescued a month earlier or a month later, stuff like that. But they're all there."

"Iron Man always has the same coloring, no matter what universe," Tony called out from out of sight.

"That's the most important part, after all!" Darcy said, trying to telegraph her rolling eyes in her tone of voice. "It would explain why there aren't any time machines, though, don't you think? If it wasn't that easy to derail events important to world history?"

"You don't think someone would try to prevent the Kennedy Assassination with a single phone call?" Tony asked, then proved he wasn't all that interested in her response (or alternatively, assumed she'd be patient enough to wait to answer him) when he immediately started up what sounded like a drill after he spoke. Darcy went the patient route, because Tony had earned some benefit of the doubt, tonight.

"Someone tried. They were dismissed as a kook," Darcy told him.

Tony came around the corner holding a very futuristic looking drill. "You are the most frustrating person to come up with hypotheticals with, did you know that?" he said, pointing to her and clicking the trigger on the first 'you' for emphasis. "You've seen every movie that might prove an exception, and now you're pulling out historical facts to do it, too.

"Thank you!" Darcy crowed, being deliberately obtuse just to piss him off. "Though, come on, we've only talked about what, three movies? In all seriousness, tell me: what do _you_ think?"

"I'd love to think it could be possible to inject some hindsight into the 'hind' part," he said quietly.

"You want history to learn how to do things better by shoving information up its ass!?" Darcy said, giggling.

Tony's bark of laughter looked like it surprised even him. "That is NOT what I-"

"You said, and I _quote,_ 'into the 'hind' part,'" Darcy gasped out, in between bouts of laughter.

"All right, command decision," Tony said decisively. "We need to train someone else to deal with Jane in case I need you to work in my labs full time as Lab Jester."


	4. World War III Happens On Schedule

**Chapter Four: 'World War III Happens On Schedule Because of Lack of Adequate Pocket Space.'**

Darcy suddenly found herself busy with a lot of unexpected administrative duties for Jane. Apparently, the folks at SHIELD had finally realized that her filing system was indecipherable to anyone other than herself and her boss, and so Darcy spent about eight hours hanging out in the lab with Jane working out the best way to explain it. She hadn't actually expected to succeed so quickly, but when Clint dropped by (and that really meant _dropped,_ given that he didn't use the door) to ask her if she had any intention of baking that day, Darcy recruited him to be _her_ lab rat.

"If you tell anyone about this, I _will_ leave you in an abandoned steam tunnel," was Clint's response when Darcy asked him to read her instructions and then file something for her.

"Even if you succeed? I mean, this is resumé material, here," Darcy laughed. She laughed harder as she watched his face scroll through various expressions as he read her three pages of instructions.

"This…" he started to say about halfway through, his mouth hanging open and starting various words without sound for the rest of his reading time. "_Really?"_ he finally said, looking up at her. Darcy grinned at him with all her powers of vindictive joy. Clint pointed to the pages he'd just read in disgust. "The worst part is, I think I understand this nonsense. I feel violated."

Wordlessly, Darcy held out the folder to be filed.

Equally wordlessly, Clint took it from her, looked at it for a few seconds, including flipping through the pages inside. His eyes narrowed, and then he walked over to the correct cabinet, scanned the labels on the drawers, slid out the right one, and placed the folder in its proper place.

Jane and Darcy clapped.

"I suppose I should be grateful you're not living an alternate life as a sadistic high school teacher. I've heard people complain about all the hoops they had to jump through writing papers, measuring the margins with a ruler, or some shit," Clint said, shaking his head. "I suppose simple alphabetization was too simple?"

"You're angling for cookies," Jane said bluntly. Immediately, Clint's demeanor changed from angry disgust to suave amusement.

"Well, _yeah,"_ he said, spreading his arms out wide at his sides as if to say 'what did you expect?!'

Darcy hugged her arms to herself and smiled the smile of someone who felt like she truly belonged.

oOoOoOo

In the Avengers Tower, the idea of what was 'normal' was completely relative. Darcy had realized this for herself in what she'd started calling 'microshocks' within two days of moving in. Walking into a room to find it full of superheroes in casual clothing? Microshock. First name basis with Iron Man? Microshock. Today, though, today there was a big shock.

Darcy woke up and made her morning coffee in the kitchen of the suite she shared with Jane. She walked over to look out of the window at the amazing view of the city as normal, but that view had a surprise: there was a massive crane setting up in a parking area beside the tower. It was the kind of crane that she'd seen before, built for both speed and lifting power. That made an Avengers Tower kind of sense (the kind that you suspended your disbelief for), because while Darcy wouldn't rule out another twenty floors being built on the tower just on a whim, this didn't look like construction. This looked like extraction or repair.

She poured her coffee into one of her Starbucks travel mugs, crammed the lid on, and left her apartment to see if anyone else had seen the commotion. At the common room windows were Steve and Natasha; Nat turned to see her approach almost the second she was visible, and Darcy lifted her mug in a silent salute. The brief, warm smile she got in return felt like its own kind of victory, but Darcy didn't expect any kind of similar response from Steve. His body language changed when Darcy walked over to stand beside Natasha. His stance became wider, he crossed his arms over his chest, and while he didn't acknowledge Darcy, he did answer her unasked question.

"I asked JARVIS about it. Says there's something in one of the labs that needs to be transported, and this is the only way. Whatever it is can't be disassembled."

Darcy felt an irrational urge to search her body for those words, as if the fanfiction she'd come across once with the premise of First Words engraved on a soulmate's body was suddenly the best explanation of why Steve Rogers had avoided speaking to her for so long. She shook her head in a awful shiver to refute the idea, and when she turned to look at Natasha, Darcy saw a look of concern.

"Felt like someone just walked over my grave, I guess. That's what my Gran used to say about those kinds of shivers. It's nothing," Darcy said. Beside them, Steve huffed out a skeptical breath and turned to leave.

"Okay, I give up. What _is it?_ What did I do?" Darcy burst out, crossing her arms in front of her angrily, all thoughts of impossible soulmates forgotten.

"I'm sorry?" Steve said in a voice that decidedly was not.

"You know about body language, don't give me that. I'm persona non grata with you, and I want to know _why,"_ Darcy bit out. "You're basically the embodiment of all that is good, honest, and just. I'm starting to feel like a villain just by virtue of being on the outs with you, Captain Rogers."

Steve shut his eyes on hearing that, and Darcy wondered which it was-disgust or dismay. When he opened them again, the look in them was unexpectedly sincere.

"I apologize for making you feel unwelcome. It's not you, not really," he said in a rigidly formal tone. "My memories are… hard work, sometimes. 'Then' and 'now' sometimes get mixed up. I'll work on it," he said, sighing. Steve scrubbed a hand through his hair, shot Natasha a nod, then power walked away from the two of them. The ding of the elevator told them where and how he went, but not why.

"That was impressive, actually," Nat said after a full minute of stunned silence. "He didn't give away _anything_ about what his problem is, but that whole thing sure gave the impression that he did."

"Yeah I feel like if I brought it up again I'd look like I was harping," Darcy said. "What the _actual _fuck?"

oOoOoOo

Darcy had every intention of talking to Tony about Steve, but she didn't get a chance to speak to him until she walked into the SCAB lab to find it almost _completely empty._

"You didn't think this was something you should maybe tell me about?" Darcy said in an admittedly petulant tone of voice as she walked over to look at the raised platform where the NTM had been sitting three days ago. "At least now I know what the crane was here for."

"Sorry, sorry," Tony said, wincing and holding his hands out in front of him apologetically.

Darcy whipped her phone out and quickly flipped it to video mode. "One more time, please?"

"No way," Tony said, grinning and putting his hands on his hips. "Lost your chance, Fraulein."

"I suppose the friendship _is_ worth more than the hits a video of Tony Stark actually apologizing for something would have been. Just barely, though," Darcy told him, stuffing her phone back into the pocket of her jeans. "But I have to ask: what now?" She gestured to the lone remaining table of tools with nothing to use them on.

Tony's body language shifted from arrogant to uncertain. "Well, now is Phase Two. Come for a drive with me?"

Darcy walked over to him. "See, this is why I get worried. You changed from arrogant billionaire to Worried Friend in a split second, just now. Your guinea pig just got freaked out."

"Don't, okay? It'll be fine. Come out for a drive, help me see if it works, and we'll come back home and you can bake me a huge batch of 'Everything Is Perfect And I'm Not Dead' cookies," Tony said, placing his hands on her shoulders. Darcy looked up at his face, noted the confidence warring with anxiety in his eyes, and bit her lip.

"Take your flashiest car? If I'm going to die in a lab accident, I want to have a nice final memory," she said, mentally shoving down her worries in favor of the proffered adventure. "Besides, I didn't sign anything. If you kill me, my family will take you to _the cleaners,_ Stark. Right, JARVIS?"

"_A quick scan of your SHIELD paperwork does show a rather large liability gap that surviving family could possibly exploit, Miss Lewis."_

"I'll never not be amused at your ability to wrap him around your finger," Tony said, releasing her shoulders and walking over to a door she never noticed before. He pressed a button, and the door slid sideways to reveal an elevator door.

"What, a Trek door but no teleporter? You are such a disappointment," Darcy said, walking over to stand beside him as they waited for the elevator. Tony's bark of laughter continued halfway down the tower.

Tony didn't let her pick the car, but the one he chose was plenty flashy. When she was buckling in, Darcy looked down at her t-shirt and over at Tony. "I admire your grace in not commenting on the Batman on my Comic Con shirt, but do you want me to change into something else before I become your test subject? Because that's what we're doing, right? All jokes aside?"

He leaned over to look at her, and amusement slowly formed on his face, starting at his eyes and growing to include a bright grin. "No, that shirt is… completely perfect, actually."

"Because it's a time machine, right? And my shirt says 2012? Tony, don't you dare strand me somewhere, or I will spend all the intervening time _building a goddamned army_ to destroy you when we sync back up again!" Darcy threatened.

"Maybe that's my plan? Maybe I know of some big invading force that's coming soon, and my entire plan is to piss off my lab assistant so much that she raises an army to resist it," Tony said, starting up the car.

"I really don't know whether I was kidding, or you are," she griped.

Her uncertainty carried them all the way to their destination, and a few quick glances at Tony led Darcy to the conclusion that he too was a bit on edge. They pulled into a large garage and parked, but the door didn't close behind them.

"I want to walk around and go into the front," Tony told her when she looked at him in confusion as she got out of the car. She nodded and followed him as he walked around the outside perimeter fence. Tony unlocked the front gate and gestured to her to come inside, stopping to look up at the entrance of the mansion.

"Insert quip about overcompensating here," Darcy said, nudging him with her elbow as she stood beside him.

"What? I thought the overcompensation would have been the giant phallic tower," Tony laughed.

Darcy looked over at him and shook her head. "Nah, that one's too easy. Besides, I am guessing this was part of your inheritance. The person who was overcompensating here was doing it for a completely different symbolic reason than your tower. There's got to be _how_ many rooms in this thing? And you don't even live here! I bet there's room for everyone _and_ a few labs. Nah, I think this is about your dad," Darcy said, the momentum of her comments slowing by the time she approached that last statement. Tony Stark's relationship with his dad was absolutely _not_ her business, and she hadn't meant to sound so decisive in her commentary about it. She walked around to stand partly in front of him with an apologetic expression on her face.

"No, you're right," Tony said, still looking at the elaborate entryway of the building. His jaw was set, but his eyes were vulnerable. "He gets what he wants, my dad." He sighed, and added, with a wry twist to his mouth that seemed to smooth all the rough and raw emotions away. "Eventually. Come on, let's go in."

They walked up to the door and Tony made a quip about ancient technology as he used his key to get in. Darcy made note of the grandness of the entryway before he led her around a corner and, of course, down a set of stairs.

"Always in the basement," Darcy griped. Tony turned to look at her quizzically. "The dangerous and life-threatening stuff. It's never on the main floor, there's always a bunch of doors and stairs as obstacles to getting away. It's like, a rule or something."

He chuckled. "Well in this case, it was more by necessity. We walked up a bit of a hill to get to the front, remember? The garage is on the main level of this part, and that's how we got it into the lab."

"Pfft, logic," Darcy scoffed.

Tony opened a door and gestured for her to walk in, and there the thing was. It looked larger and shinier somehow, and Darcy chalked that up to the lack of a platform for it to rest on, here. She turned to look at Tony. "This is where you ask me if I have any last words," she said. The confident tone she'd been going for was conspicuously missing, which might have had something to do with the dimness of the room and the faint ominous sense she had about the whole evening.

Tony's brows were furrowed, and his jaw was set again. His body language of stubbornness had started to trigger a flood of affection from her that Darcy found both frustrating and endearing. She suspected that Pepper did, too. From his pocket, Tony pulled out a circular metal case barely bigger than his palm. When he opened it, a glow lit up his face like a flashlight during a ghost story.

"Before you start, I just want you to know I know," Darcy told him impulsively. The shocked, slightly scared look Tony shot her upon hearing this was super worrisome.

"You know?" he asked her, his voice quiet and serious.

"Yep," Darcy nodded. "The punchline of the ghost story. The hook is attached to the door handle. You don't even have to try to scare me, I've heard it all before."

Tony actually shut the metal case with a snap and scrubbed a hand over his face in relieved exasperation. Then, he pointed at her. "You are _hard work,_ did you know that?"

"I did, actually. You should have done a better job picking your lab rats. You might actually miss me when you activate that thing and it leaves me floating in space sometime in the early 2000s," Darcy said, walking over to the NTM and swinging herself up into the seat. "Is there a seatbelt?"

"You're not going to die in the vacuum of space. I wouldn't do that to you. I've been there before, it's very boring," Tony said, walking over to rest his hands on either side of the arch of metal she'd climbed through. The case with what she presumed was an arc reactor in it was still in his right hand.

"We're really good at hiding this stuff in flippant comments, aren't we?" Darcy asked quietly.

"Yeah."

"If you don't tell me what to do when I get there, how will I get back? Because I'm renaming this contraption. It's not the 'Not Time Machine' anymore. It's the 'Totally A Freaking Time Machine.' And TAFTM is a stupid acronym, that's how thrown I am by all of this. You've broken me, Stark." Darcy leaned her head against the framework near his hand. She made eye contact with him, held his gaze for a second, and then asked, slowly and deliberately, "Why me?"

Tony answered immediately, confidently. "Because I know you'll make it. It _has_ to be you."

He was wearing that vulnerable, stubborn expression she'd recognized before. The weight of how important he clearly thought all of this was dragged the next words out of her.

"I trust you."

In response, he handed her the metal case, and she opened it to see the beautiful power supply she'd known would be in there. She traced the air above it for a few seconds before she handed it back.

"Okay, Doc Brown, do you have any admonitions not to steal an almanac full of money-making sports bets? A guide for how to save the hippogriff and how not to be seen? A rabbit suit and a set of instructions on how to strangle myself in utero?"

"You're an almanac all by yourself, Darcy Lewis," Tony told her from somewhere behind her. A clicking sound accompanied by a low frequency electric hum told her he'd set the arc reactor in place. "No instructions other than this: don't kill anyone, no matter how much they drive you crazy."

"That's _super_ encouraging," Darcy said with thick sarcasm. She reached out toward the empty space where he'd been standing before, her heart suddenly full of anxiety. "This is just a test, right? To see if it works? Promise me I'll see you again, Tony. I don't know if I want to live in some crazy future with you not in it. Or the past, for that matter. What year were you born?"

Tony walked back into view and smiled at her. The smile definitely reached his eyes as he stretched his own hand out to grasp hers firmly.

"I _promise_ you'll see me again."

Then, Tony squeezed her hand and let go. He walked behind her again and asked a single question, to which her answer was 'yes.'

"Ready?"

oOoOoOo

Even pop culture aficionados had their failings, sometimes. When the bright flash of light overtook her and she felt a sensation of moving, Darcy knew she should open her eyes and look around, so she could explain what her experience was like for future generations.

Instead, she closed her eyes and held on.

oOoOoOo

When Darcy opened her eyes again, the room didn't seem to have changed at all. She was still oriented toward the same view she had been when she'd first sat down! When she opened her hands Darcy felt the numbing pain of a truly strong grip enhanced by fear. She took stock of her situation-the room looked the same, so that meant… what? Did she arrive in a future where the room was empty because she and the Possibly A Time Machine had already left? Did she arrive in the past before the thing had even been placed in the room?

She climbed out of it gingerly and walked around to the back. Darcy couldn't prevent her startled laugh when she saw that beside the place in the machine that the arc reactor sat attached to the wiring was the metal box it had come from. Tony must have designed a pocket for its box to live in, and that told Darcy that she probably ought to take it out and put it inside.

Probably not with her fingers, though.

"Tony?" Darcy called out. Was he hiding, working in his lab because it's now last week, or was Tony not even born yet?

With a shrug, Darcy decided to try to see if the table of tools she could see against the far wall might have a set of tongs. She felt like it could be important to put the arc reactor in its case, though she didn't know for sure. It didn't actually take her too long to find a few tools that might work, and she was surprised and happy to find that moving the arc reactor from one place to another didn't seem like it was too catastrophic. Though, given how smart Tony was, he would have left her a specialized device welded into the damned thing if it had been necessary.

Which she hadn't bothered to search for.

Darcy gasped and examined every inch of the back of the PATM looking for just such a tool, the closed box with the arc reactor in it clutched close to her chest. It took twice as long as it had taken to actually move it to its box before she was completely sure that she hadn't done something very stupid by not checking first. She put out a hand to catch herself and sagged against the curved metal as her heart rate started to slow back to a more normal rhythm.

"Tony, I swear if this is the world's most elaborate episode of Punk'd, I'll team up with Pepper and bankrupt your ass!" she said into the dimly lit recesses of the room.

From somewhere else in the house, Darcy heard a man's voice call out, but the sound was too muffled to make sense of the words. Her heart rate started to pick up again, and Darcy looked at the metal case in her hand. She went to stuff it in a pocket, but it didn't fit.

"If that's my downfall after possibly managing to be the world's first time traveler, I'm going to spontaneously combust out of pure irony," Darcy said to herself. "'World War III Happens On Schedule Because of Lack of Adequate Pocket Space.'"

The voice called out again, and it sounded closer this time. Darcy shoved the arc reactor box into her waistband instead of using it like a flashlight, even though she couldn't really see anything.

"Stark?" she called out.

"Who's there?" the man's voice sounded like it was saying. It was closer than before.

Darcy told herself not to punch Tony when he appeared. Future Tony and Past Tony both would probably know his plans, but it was bad form to punch the person who helped you make history. Not like SHIELD would ever let her tell anyone…

"Stark? I'm in here!" Darcy shouted.

A door on the other side of the device burst open.

"Show yourself!" the man said.

It wasn't Tony's voice.

Darcy put her hands up, secure in the knowledge that her Comic Con shirt was a size too big (because of the boob space, of course), and thus raising her arms wouldn't reveal the box in her waistband.

"Here," she said, her voice shaky with the adrenaline. It was probably a caretaker for the house, but even so, she wasn't about to make any sudden moves, in case that caretaker was armed.

The man that walked around the Definitely A Time Machine was tall. His hair was dark, and so was the thin mustache on his upper lip. She couldn't see his eye color in the low light, but he looked familiar. He was wearing a suit, his cuffs were loose, and he had no tie. The top button of his white dress shirt was unbuttoned. As Darcy examined him, she saw that he was looking at her with equal interest. Something about his familiarity and the old fashioned haircut he wore made her feel strangely underdressed in her jeans and t-shirt. Darcy looked back up at his face and took a small step forward, trying to see him more clearly. As she did, he made eye contact with her.

"I'm going to make a guess," the man said. His voice was less resonant than she had expected, and he had a bit of a New York accent. "I'm not the Stark you were expecting."

His eyes were warm, assessing, and intelligent. Darcy suddenly realized where she'd seen him before, but she still doubted herself a little. This man was very young compared to the pictures she'd seen.

"I'm going to make a guess too," Darcy said softly, lowering her arms to her sides instead of holding them like a caught burglar. She kept her head still, even though she felt an urge to shake it back and forth, over and over and over until she woke back up in Tony Stark's presence again. "This is your house. You own it."

"I think we're both right," the man said.

He smiled, and Darcy closed her eyes for a few seconds. Her heart knew who this was _(he's so young, holy FUCK, how far back did Tony send me?! Good God, I want to go back home RIGHT NOW)_, but her mind refused to let her say it even in her own head.

"How about one more guess?" he said, holding a hand out, palm down in front of himself soothingly. Darcy started to take deep calming breaths, and she nodded. "Where you came from-" and here, he broke off, shaking his head sideways as if his lips didn't want to obey the words he was trying to force into them. "Where you came from, I'm dead," he said, his eyes full of wonder. He stepped forward then, and the light hit his face.

_He is handsome. Tony's dad is handsome,_ Darcy thought to herself. She'd tricked herself into acknowledging the thing she wasn't prepared to admit, and in doing so, she gave herself a mental shake. _Tony's dad was TONY'S DAD, and he was a complete asshole, Darcy. Get a grip._

Somewhere deep inside her, as she nodded an unspoken answer to Stark's question, Darcy asked herself another one. _Is he a jerk now? Is he a jerk _yet? There was no way to know, but she knew how he would end up, and how much he would hurt her friend. She knew she needed to be careful.

"And I'm not born yet. Not by a long shot," Darcy said, letting out a bubble of inane laughter as she spoke.

Stark took another step toward her, now only about three feet away. "If the number on your shirt is a _year,_ definitely not," he said, staring at her chest.

Darcy crossed her arms. "Eyes _off_ of Batman and his friends, please," she said in a cross voice.

Stark burst out laughing, clapping his hands together in amusement. "You are exactly the kind of person I'd hope would be associated with my heirs someday," he told her admiringly. "Feisty and beautiful."

"Watch it, old man, I could be your granddaughter," Darcy said, stepping away from him several paces.

His eyes narrowed. They were brown, she saw. Just like Tony's. "Not a chance," he said softly. "Stark genes are pretty strong. I'd know."

They looked at each other for a long moment, and Darcy felt very off-balance, despite her obvious advantages over him. If Howard Stark was this young, it was probably not even 1950 yet, and Darcy knew sixty plus years' worth of history full of things that he could hardly even dream of. She barely knew anything about the 40's and 50's, though, and this man standing in front of her certainly did.

"Did you come for a reason? The misuse of the Super Soldier?" Stark asked, a thread of barely contained excitement in his voice. "And the device!" he said, a gasp of shock accompanying his words as if he'd somehow forgotten it was there until just that moment. "Did _I_ build this? Did one of my heirs?"

As Stark turned away from her to look hungrily at the Absolutely A Time Machine, Darcy thought about his question. If she remembered her history correctly, there was a very short series of months during which Steve Rogers had been successfully transformed into a super soldier but was being used for propaganda films instead of something more appropriate. But that had been over a year before the war had ended!

Even if Darcy _did_ raise up an army of eighteen year olds to kick Tony Stark's ass for sending her back so far in time, they'd all be senior citizens by the time they got there. Even Darcy herself. Hell, Tony wasn't even due to be born for another… what? Thirty years?!

She had to go back.

"Your face is very expressive," the elder Stark told her, interrupting her reverie. "That number on your shirt, 2012. That stands for the year, doesn't it?"

Darcy gave in to the urge to cover her mouth in response to the shock of her realizations. "Yes," she said against the warmth of her fingers. "He said he'd see me again," she said next, a film of tears obscuring the image of the man in front of her and the time machine he was standing beside. "He could _not_ have meant as a baby, could he? He wouldn't have-" she broke off, shutting her eyes and feeling the tears dislodge and fall.

"I'll bet you are talking about my grandson," Stark said, his unfamiliar voice reminding her that even with her eyes shut, she had evidence that she was in the wrong place at the wrong time. "And I'll further bet that he had a reason. The question is, does he have any kind of security clearance to know what I have been doing?"

"Just how long do you think those things stay classified for?" Darcy asked, her eyes still closed. She didn't correct his guess. "It's what? 1943? 1944? That's almost seventy years!"

"The things that no one finds out about stay classified forever," Stark said quietly. "Speaking of which, this? This is probably one of those things."

Darcy opened her eyes to see Stark hovering his hands almost reverently over the wiring and switches on the back of the time machine.

"Wait," he said, crouching down to examine something. Darcy knew exactly what it was, and she wasn't even surprised that it hadn't taken him very long to find it. "Something's missing. The power supply."

"If you had that piece, could you figure out how to send me back?" Darcy whispered. She felt incredibly vulnerable. She knew no resistance tactics, nothing about how to keep secret things from being revealed during an interrogation. Howard Stark was definitely on the right side of history when it came to World War II, but Darcy knew things that could change large swathes of history just by pure advanced warning alone. What's worse, she didn't know enough about them to be able to fudge details to obscure their significance. A sharp, metallic taste filled her mouth and her heart raced. She hoped to hell that Stark was too enamoured of the device in front of him to notice.

"Of course I could," Stark said without any hesitation. "All it takes is motivation."

He turned to look at her, still crouched in front of the time machine, and Darcy didn't know the man, but she knew that look. It was calculating, that look. It was full of meaning. It was full of _promise._


End file.
